The attitude that the primary purpose of education is to prepare individuals to play a productive role in society seems almost instinctive. This appears to be the received view of countless multitudes either contemplating higher education or already enrolled in such institutions, of parents and sponsors, of governments and higher education institutions and, of course, employers. And yet, in truth, it will be admitted by many who have had anything to do with the business of, especially, higher education that they have entertained doubts as to its real value. This paper, on the strength of a binomial logistic regression analysis of new graduates’ employment status, proposes that individual higher education enrolment choice can be explained by a mix of both human capital and screening theory interpretations of the perceived value of the commodity of higher education. This finding is supported in the literature.
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